David Gunn - Death's head

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

Her question makes me smile. “Behave yourself,” I tell her, “and no one will ever know. The senator is dead. His villa is in ruins. And you…well, you’re already dead on the stairs, aren’t you?”

Aptitude nods, doubtfully.

Octo V is thirteen, his hair falls in waves over thin shoulders, and his eyes are clear and fixed on the future. He’s been thirteen for my entire life and will probably still be thirteen when rust finally eats the cheap metal cross over my grave. Quite why he likes that age is hard to say.

No one has dared ask.

Maybe he believes a child emperor is intrinsically more heroic, or maybe he really does have no sense of human time. It’s probably unwise to speculate.

Either way, this city is full of statues of a smartly uniformed child. He wears cavalry dress, frock coats, pilot’s goggles, and sometimes carries a cane or a swagger stick. In the most famous statue of all he wears the shapeless uniform of an astronaut, from the days before Octovians rediscovered style.

It has to be intentional.

The poor touch his statues for luck, leaving OctoV’s hands and feet worn smooth and bright, while the rest of him remains the strange green that bronze gets when it grows old. Farlight is a city of statues. Senators in robes and generals in uniform, noble-looking gods and naked women, more naked women than you can possibly imagine.

All are made from bronze, all ridiculously beautiful, mostly with full breasts and wide hips…mothers washing their hair, feeding children, sitting contemplating or composing poetry, girls with bows and quivers, with wings, clutching bunches of flowers to their hearts.

The subject doesn’t seem to matter so long as they are naked, which probably tells you more about the inhabitants of Farlight than a dozen slab guides do. I’m in a park beside a statue of a girl washing her feet in a bronze stream. The stream has ripples and the faintest suggestion of a current. The girl has curling hair, soft hips, and neatly crossed legs, so she can reach her ankles.

Serenity, announces the label.

Maybe in Farlight. Anywhere else, and she’d need guards to fight off the crowds if she sat around on a riverbank like that.

Mr. deCharge is late.

At least I’m assuming the message is his. It gave a time-five minutes ago-and a place, here beside the Serenity statue. As I wait, an old woman comes to nod at the bronze girl and a boy leaves bread crumbs beside her feet, while a child half the age of Aptitude rips bougainvillea from a bush and tosses its blossoms into bronze water, as if she believes the stream is real.

Serenity has another name, obviously.

One known only to…

The poor, I think, as instinct kicks me off the bench and the air ripples. A carbon dart passes through the space where my head was, then splinters into fragments against the statue behind.

A twig breaking.

That’s what I heard. Sixteen years of combat training overrides a handful of days in this strange and sloppy city. As I wait, flat on the ground, I try to work out if there are two attackers and if one of them is busy creeping around behind me, puff gun in his hand.

It’s a strange choice of weapon, except that a pulse rifle might melt the bronze girl, and that would undoubtedly cause more trouble than one dead soldier in a public park, so maybe there’s logic to the choice after all.

“You can stand up now.”

The voice is familiar. Amused, positively pleased with itself.

Rolling over, I extract a throwing spike from its sheath and hurl it toward where I think the voice should be. Someone swears.

“Enough,” says the voice.

I’ve got a gun in my hand now, and as the uniformed figure twists my spike from the fir tree behind which he’s been hiding, I reach kneeling position and draw a bead on his head.

“Targeted,” announces my SIG diabolo.

Major Silva blanches.

“Targeted…” The gun’s getting impatient.

“You passed,” says the major. “That was the final test.”

“Wait,” I tell the gun.

The major is the same dapper figure. His diffidence is as much an affectation as it ever was, and he seems to be alone, which impresses me.

“You can put that down,” he says.

I look at the SIG, then shake my head. “Where’s deCharge?”

“Dead.”

“You killed him?”

Major Silva nods. “He supplied your kyp, which was faulty…The man breeds them,” he says, amending it to “bred them.”

“And I can’t get the bloody thing out?”

He shakes his head.

Something interesting has just occurred to me. “So you can’t get another one in?” He realizes the importance of this, or maybe he just sees the relief in my face. I’ve been shot, I’ve had bones broken and suffered beatings from Sergeant Fitz that left me barely able to crawl across a floor, but nothing comes close to my body’s battle with the kyp.

“No,” he says. “We can’t.”

During the course of this brief conversation, my gun gets lowered, although my trigger finger is still hooked through its guard, and the shell-retained-in-chamber diode on its handle remains red.

“Where did you get that?”

“Took it off Aptitude Wildeside’s bodyguard.”

“It shouldn’t work for you.”

“Well, it does,” I say. “And I’m keeping it.” I raise the muzzle slightly just in case I need to make the point.

The major sighs. “You can’t go around threatening Death’s Head officers.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I can.”

“You’re covered,” he tells me. “I’ve got a dozen snipers out there.”

“Bullshit.”

“Are you prepared to take that risk?”

“Yes.”

At this, the major grins. “You’ll do,” he says. “Colonel Nuevo said you would…I’m going to break this down, okay?”

After he’s stripped his puff gun into a dozen pieces, he tosses the chassis, barrel, and air cylinder in a trash can and rips open a silver sachet of dark red powder, which he sprinkles over the top. Seconds later there’s a flash and the gun goes up in a sheet of white flame. It takes the can with it, but casual vandalism obviously doesn’t come high on Major Silva’s list of worries.

“Usually,” he tells me, “I’d put you through training. Six months in the academy and then a tour of duty, but at the colonel’s suggestion we’re going to skip the academy.”

It takes me a second to realize what he’s saying.

“You leave in three hours…” Major Silva catches my stare. “Report to the Death’s Head HQ on Casaubon Square. They’ll issue you a uniform. And if anyone asks, tell them you have my permission to carry that.”

He’s referring to the SIG diabolo.

We walk to the edge of the park together, a weird-enough couple to attract glances from those we pass, although the glances are discreet.

At the road, the major hesitates. As I said, it’s an affectation. All that diffidence, the irony and dry humor exist because the uniform he wears allows them to exist. This man is a killer, just as I am, but he’s a killer with manners and a good tailor, or whatever people like him use to make their uniforms.

“By the way,” he says. “Well done.”

I want to go back to Golden Memories, say my good-byes to Aptitude. Not to mention Lisa and Angelique, although it’s a very different type of good-bye I have in mind for us. Instead I find a public video booth and feed it a credit, patching myself through to the public booth at Golden Memories. Someone answers after the thirty-eighth ring.

“What?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Good to hear from you, too.”

“Sven?” It’s Lisa.

“Everything okay?”